The Patience of Christian Pulisic, American Soccer’s Great Hope

Christian Pulisic has almost single-handedly revived the United States’ hopes.

Photograph by Rebecca Blackwell / AP

Back in March, during the fifty-ninth minute of a Champions League match
between Borussia Dortmund and Benfica, the eighteen-year-old American
Christian Pulisic, playing forward for Dortmund, sensed an opportunity
as he scurried back onside among four Benfica defenders clustered near
the top of the penalty box. He made a curling run parallel to the goal
and gestured for the ball to be played ahead of him into a seam. After a
deftly threaded pass from a teammate, Pulisic accelerated and nimbly
chipped the ball over the onrushing goalkeeper, sending Dortmund to the
quarter-finals. It was a masterpiece of finishing by an attacking
player, but it was the delayed run that set up the goal.

This week, I thought of Pulisic’s patience in that moment. On Sunday, in
the waning minutes of a World Cup qualifying match between the United
States and Mexico, with the score knotted 1–1, the American goalkeeper,
Brad Guzan, sent a booming goal kick about ninety yards downfield.
Several players rose in a scrum to meet Guzan’s delivery, but the ball
scudded past them. After a single bounce, Pulisic, playing this time in
a wide-midfielder role, chested the ball down, several yards from the
touchline. As a Mexican defender rushed toward him, Pulisic leaned ever
so slightly left before nudging the ball right with the outside of his
foot. The defender tried to interpose his body and shove Pulisic’s
slight frame aside, but Pulisic was already past him, pushing the ball
toward the goal, with several yards of space to line up his shot.

Watching from my living-room couch, I felt a hammering of expectation
inside my chest. The U.S. men’s national soccer team had never won a
World Cup qualifying match in Estadio Azteca, the high-altitude cauldron in Mexico City that
is the official stadium for the Mexican national team. I was certain that I
was about to witness an anointing. Just three days earlier, in another
qualifying match, Pulisic had scored two goals to break a scoreless
stalemate against Trinidad and Tobago. The first of these, a sliding
effort in the fifty-second minute, had been merely opportunistic: a
teammate had slotted the ball into the vulnerable area directly in front
of the goal, and Pulisic, who had been trailing the play, pounced. But
his second goal, ten minutes later, demonstrated his unusual ability to
project calm while in turbulent motion. He dashed toward the goal behind
a defender, receiving the ball at a flat sprint before pausing, just for
an instant, to properly align his feet and his body, and then curled a shot inside the near post. Pulisic conjured another bit of
wizardry in the United States’ previous qualifying match, a crucial 1–1
draw against Panama. Just before halftime, he neatly nicked the ball
from a larger Panamanian defender, shook off the defender’s flailing
arm, pivoted in a tight space back toward the goal, then lightly tapped
the ball to change direction once more, and finally sent it—with
his weaker left foot—to the veteran forward Clint Dempsey, who slammed
it into the back of the net.

On Sunday evening, however, in Mexico, Pulisic’s side-footed, bending
effort sailed wide. He kicked out his leg in frustration. I groaned from
my couch. The match ended in a draw—still a good result for the U.S.
team, marking only the fourth time that it avoided defeat at Azteca. Even
so, I cursed the intervening of reality in the Pulisic fable. Until this
point, his rise had been in the genre of fantasy. Last year, on a chilly
March night in Columbus, Ohio, he made his American début, coming on as
a substitute late in a match against Guatemala, with the U.S. ahead by
three goals. At seventeen years and a hundred and ninety-three days old,
he became the youngest American ever to play in a World Cup qualifying
match. A minute and a half later, he took the ball on a slashing
counterattack straight at a Guatemalan defender, offering a glimpse of
the revelation he would become. Pulisic, who recently completed his
first full season for Dortmund, in Germany’s Bundesliga, brings a
fearlessness and aplomb when challenging defenders one on one. Those
qualities have been rare among American players, even as the pool of
talent in this country has widened. In September, against St. Vincent
and the Grenadines, Pulisic wore the number ten for the first time as a
member of the senior national team. The number is traditionally bestowed
upon a team’s most creative playmaker, but its recent history for the
United States has been less than glorious. (In the 2014 World Cup, it
was worn by Mix Diskerud; he was one of only two field players on the team who failed
to see action during the tournament.) Pulisic appeared untroubled by the
mantle, contributing two goals and an assist as part of a 6–0 romp.

In the fall, the United States finished atop its group in the fourth
round of World Cup qualifying. But it stumbled badly in its first two
matches of the following round, the Hexagonal, a six-team tournament
that determines which nations from North and Central America and the
Caribbean will compete in the 2018 World Cup, in Russia. First came a
2–1 loss to Mexico in Columbus, in November, then a 4–0 humiliation by
Costa Rica, in March. That left the U.S. team tied, with Trinidad and
Tobago, for last place. U.S. soccer officials fired Jürgen Klinsmann,
the former German striker who had coached the national team since 2011.
Bruce Arena, who led the U.S. team to a quarter-final finish in the 2002
World Cup, was brought in to right the program. But it is Pulisic who
has almost single-handedly revived the United States’ hopes. The team
scored nine goals in its next three competitive matches, earning two
wins and a draw; Pulisic scored, or assisted on, all but three of those
goals.

For American fans looking for a cleated savior, the signs all seem to
be there. But, before Pulisic, there was Julian Green, who, as a
nineteen-year-old, in 2014, became the youngest U.S.M.N.T. player to
score in the World Cup, then proceeded to struggle at both the club and
international levels. And before Green there was Freddy
Adu,
whose teen-age promise gave way to a journeyman career that he is now
trying to revive, most recently at the Tampa Bay Rowdies, in the second-tier North
American Soccer League.

Earlier this month, Michael Caley, a soccer writer for Nate Silver’s
statistically minded Web site FiveThirtyEight, made the
case that Pulisic was already one of the most dangerous players in the
Bundesliga, which is one of the world’s three great leagues, along with
England’s Premier League and Spain’s La Liga. Pulisic ranked
fifth in the Bundesliga in successful take-ons—instances when he dribbled past an opponent—per ninety
minutes, surpassing even the
fleet Dutch winger Arjen Robben, of Bayern Munich, who is considered one of the
fastest players in the world. “There have been roughly 100 million males
born in America in the past 50 years,” Caley wrote. “Among that total,
there appears to finally be one who can safely be called a legitimate
international soccer star.”

But is it really safe? I thought of Pulisic’s patient, curling run
before his goal against Benfica. Sometimes in soccer it is important
to wait, if only for a moment, to allow the play to develop.